Review | First Came Forever by Annie Woods

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange of an honest review. All thoughts and opinions in this review are my own!

Synposis: (Taken from Goodreads)

First love. A promise of forever. A lie that changes everything.

Backpacking with her high school friends, Erica Lindell’s life takes a thrilling new turn. Meeting the fascinating Sasha Ailes, she can’t help but fall completely and irrevocably in love with him. When he feels the same way about her, Erica finds herself drawn into a fairytale love story that will set her life on a new direction. But Sasha has kept his true identity a secret. Finding out who he really is, Erica must overcome the betrayal and make the hardest choice of her life. Can she give up her own dreams to live in his world, or leave and lose him forever?

First Came Forever is an enchanting, heart-wrenching story about finding true love and the devastating consequences it can lead to. What price is too high to pay, even for love?

My Review:

First Came Forever is a contemporary romance book that shows the struggles of growing from a teenager into an adult, finding love and learning to adjust yourself for it.

It took me a while to get into the book since I’m not someone who would pick up a book like this easily. It’s not bad, it’s just not my style.

First Came Forever starts off with the Swedish Erica backpacking through another continent with her group of high school friends. This is where my frist issue with the story came into play. I felt like on every other page there was at least one comment that said that Erica was “different from other girls her age.” Mentioning this to show how grown up the main character is for the set up of rest of the story isn’t a bad thing but it does become that when it’s written on every page you read for the first 25-something pages.

I got the idea that the idea should be in the background of the reader’s mind so, in later situations,they wouldn’t think her naive and rash. I understood this need because there are definitely situations where I wanted to sit Erica down and have a talk with her about following strangers and all the evil in the world but the only thing the repeated “I’m different” speech gave me was a sense of repeatition that began to irritate me after a while.

This and other aspects of the beginning, like Erica not speaking up for herself, made me take longer than it should for me to get through the beginning. They also made me a bit annoyed towards Erica and I couldn’t properly bond with her character because of it which also altered the way I saw her relationships with the other characters, especially the friendships.

Now for a more positive opinion before you think this book wasn’t enjoyable: the idea behind the story was adorable and I was totally dreaming of being in Erica’s position! I can already see me with my own personal guy-in-Sasha’s-position! I was totally swooning over their relationship but on there were also things that I didn’t like. If I looked at it from a realistic point of view then their relationship wasn’t a perfect one, mainly because of all the secrets between them. Even when Sasha started revealing more of himself there were things that were held back and as a consequence he felt like a detached character where he should have been the one everyone falls in love with.

So even though it was a real-life modern fairytale sometimes it focused more on the “fairytale” and less of the “real-life.”

That being said, Erica and Sasha were seriously a fairytale made to cry over.

The book was such a rollercoaster.

There was a moment in the middle of the book where I felt like it was ‘settling,’ but now that I look back it was more the calm before the storm.

After this period things just started happening and my heart couldn’t decide on a pace it wanted to beat at. Sasha and Erica had a rough path to walk together and I really wanted to walk it with them.

And I did.

Believe me I did.

There were so many emotions involved while reading this book. I was swooning (I feel the need to mention that I haven’t forgotten of Tylor’s existence), laughing, making weird faces at character’s behavior…

This book had so many aspects and important subjects that were mentioned or brought out without them feeling too pushed. There was the defending of LGBT+ in the face of old and traditional thinking, charity work but also personal stuff like how difficult relationships, romantic or not, can be.

This is really a book you should form an opinion on for yourself because I feel that you can’t really say much without spoiling it so I’ll give you a few more comments and leave you to read the book for yourself!

The end left me gasping for the second book.

I gave it 3.75 stars because it’s a good book that I think a lot of people will love, but at the same time there were parts that felt like the story wasn’t processing much or where I felt too much disinterest.

I can see that this book was just the beginning and I have high hopes for the rest of the series.